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  He was kicked and harassed until he desperately tried to gain his knees to avoid the punishment.

  He was promptly snatched then and a noose looped around his neck, which was jerked tight as the ogre at the other end of it, pulled at it like a child urging a reluctant dog to follow its lead. It was either find his feet or choke as the slipknot tightened. The tatters of his pants hindered him, hanging off his knees as they did, tripping him and making him stagger until one of the ogres hissed and hauled him back against its hips and tore the rags and the one remaining boot from his body, leaving him completely naked in their midst. Shriveled and pitiful and scared and jerked ruthlessly behind them, bare feet catching every thorn and every sharp bristle and burr that he passed.

  He was bleeding again in short order, body lashed by whipcord branches pulled back by the passage of the giants ahead of him. His feet were torn and bruised, knees scraped bloody from too many falls to count, blood trickling down his neck from the abrasion of the rough cord looped about it.

  They spoke very little when they moved, the passage of their bodies noise enough through trees that were not always spaced wide enough to accommodate them.

  Once, they were alerted to something that he was too numb to notice and one pulled him up into its arms, hand covering his face in a smothering embrace while the others slipped into the wood. Yhalen blacked out from lack of breath and came to ass up over a broad shoulder, the others back from whatever had caught their attention.

  Easier to lie there, carted about like slain game, fading in and out of consciousness, then stumble along in their wake, so he kept his body limp and let the afternoon pass in a haze of disorientation. It only lasted so long. The brute carrying him tired of it soon enough and tossed Yhalen to the earth, barking at him in irritation and prodding at him with a huge booted foot. Yhalen rolled away as best he could, clambering gracelessly to his feet and standing there with his head spinning from being carried so long with it hanging. His leash was snatched up and again he was yanked along in their wake.

  Helpless. Hopeless. Fearing the onslaught of dusk when his massive captors might stop and renew their play from the night before. But night and a cessation of travel proved agonizingly far away.

  Yhalen was no stranger to vigorous exertion—the rites a youth had to pass to be called a warrior were strenuous and harsh—but the pace these creatures set with their long legs and their boundless strength was relentless. He had to jog more often than not to keep from being jerked off his feet and dragged along the ground behind them.

  He became numb to the pain of torn feet—numb to the scream of protesting muscles, to the constant abrasion of rope about his neck, to the bite of the insects that were drawn to the stench of the ogres and found his naked skin irresistible—numb to everything but the need to keep his feet and stumble along at the end of his leash. The world narrowed to that simple goal. He forgot Yherji and Yhakinor, forgot shame and dishonor and the censure of the ancestors. When he’d been cognizant enough to desire it, death had seemed a precious thing—now, with cognizance numbed and hazy, instinct took over and all his body sought was survival.

  When they did stop, with night sounds breaking the stillness of the forest—Yhalen stood trembling on rubbery legs, head down and breathing harsh, like a beast driven too far, too long. His bladder ached, full and hard from a day forced to hold it in, but the ogres had no care for tending him in such matters or releasing him to let him tend himself, so, able to contain it no more, his body forced release and the urine dribbled down his legs, hot and stinging the scratches on his skin.

  He hadn’t even the presence of mind to feel mortification. Just stood there and shook until the ogre into whose care he’d been given loomed over him and without warning knocked him from his feet.

  Yhalen hit the ground face first, an ungainly sprawl of legs that the brute squatted down and seized, catching both ankles in one hand and drawing them back towards Yhalen’s head, bowing his body painfully as the end of the leash around his neck was twined about his ankles. His thighs screamed protest at the awkward position, but there was no choice but to strain to inch his legs closer to keep the noose from choking him.

  He was abandoned like that, after a cruel chuckle from the ogre, to lay gasping for what air he could suck in through the tightening loop around his throat. Through spinning, wavery vision he watched them set up their crude camp. Listened to the gruff rumble of their voices as they spoke amongst each other. One of them came back with game and they sat about skinning it and spitting it and watching the meat sizzle over the flames. They looked his way a few times and he quaked in dread, but they made no move to come and torment him.

  Once after their meal had been consumed, their leader padded over and crouched over Yhalen. The ogre ran one speculative finger down the taut bowed line of Yhalen’s chest and tummy, lingered at his unprotected groin and nudged the limp flesh at the juncture of his legs. The ogre whispered something that might have been a question. Yhalen hardly knew. Yhalen hardly had the sense to rationalize anything, the terror so completely overwhelmed his mind and body. He hadn’t even the power to shut his eyes and block out the hated face with its yellow eyes and its gold nose ring and dangling ear hoops. The ogre spoke again, softly to himself, then rose and retreated back to the company of his fellows.

  Yhalen didn’t sleep. He couldn’t, with his muscles screaming in pain and strangulation imminent should he let his body relax. When they released him in the morning, ready to take up their march again, his legs were good for nothing, no matter how hard they yanked at his leash or shoved at him to make him walk. With blood in his mouth from their encouragement and his legs cramping so badly that tears streamed down his cheeks, he was tossed over an armored shoulder and carried. He did sleep then—plunged into blessed oblivion for some time until he was woken abruptly by the cold touch of water enveloping his body.

  His reflexive gasp for breath succeeded only in filling his lungs with water and it wasn’t until a large hand hauled him up by the hair that he was able to gag and choke and spew the water out. He was dunked again, in short order and held there, regardless of frantically kicking legs and twisting body, while sand was scrubbed over his skin, roughly washing away the grime and blood. He was allowed air once more, helped up by a grip on his upper arms, with his feet dragging the surface of the stream, while the ogre peered at him critically. Apparently satisfied, it flung him to the sandy beach where he landed on his knees. It splashed out of the water behind him and drew from its belt a large, wicked knife, every bit as long as Yhalen’s sword had been. Longer, and yet in the ogre’s hand it seemed short and stubby.

  Yhalen cringed, but it only grasped his arm and sliced through the ropes binding his hands behind his back. After two days bound, his arms fell numb and useless to his sides. His hands were red and slightly swollen and he prayed to the Goddess that he’d not lost the use of any fingers. He wouldn’t know until the feeling came back and that in itself was a dreaded thing, for even now, as the first blood rushed back, the pain was horrible. It hardly gave him time to regain sense in his limbs though, before it snatched his hands again and retied them in front of his body, leaving a long stretch of rope as a lead, which it then grasped and used to haul him to his feet.

  Yhalen managed to stagger along in the ogre’s wake, his vision swimming in and out of focus, his hair dripping wet down his shoulders and the sodden tail of his braid lying heavy against his spine. It took him a moment to make sense of the sounds. Of voices, loud and gruff and foreign. And numerous.

  Of the sound of animals and the constant clang of what might have been a blacksmith’s hammer on an anvil. In dull surprise, he made himself look beyond the ground at his feet, and found himself at the edge of the wood, where a great grassy vale spread out.

  And within that vale sat a camp. A collection of huge tents and cooking fires, around which milled a great many hulking ogre forms. Dozens of them. More than his overtaxed mind could account for. And here and th
ere, he thought he saw the smaller forms of human men. Men in ragged scraps of clothing, 9

  with pale blonde hair and beards, who squatted over cooking fires or carted buckets of water, or wood.

  Men who walked with their heads down, bare backs more often than not decorated with bold tattoos and necks adorned with crude iron collars.

  Some of their eyes flickered at him in passing. Dull, emotionless stares that held no pity for his nudity or bondage, or the cruel way he was jerked along the ogre’s wake.

  The four who had captured him, he thought numbly, had been scouts. And this was a war camp. It could be nothing else with the armor and the weapons that were so apparent. And one that had already seen battle—or slaughter, if the rancid, decaying human heads that hung from a rope outside one tent were any indication.

  Yhalen gagged, shutting his eyes on the atrocity, at the casual display of death—and came up short against the back of his guide, when the ogre stopped to converse with the familiar one with the gold hoops. Yhalen’s leash was transferred to that hated hand and without a look in his direction, he was led further into the camp until finally they reached a tent more ornate than the others. A set of tall, thick spears sat on either side of the door flap and from between them was strung a line that supported dangling trinkets. Gold-tipped bones, cast iron adornments that might have been rune signs, the curved claws and teeth of some animal that must have been monstrous even in comparison to the ogres themselves.

  Gold earrings shoved Yhalen to the trampled grass, hard enough to take his breath away, and he leaned over his knees, forehead pressed to the ground to stop the world from spinning. His captor called out and was answered. Yhalen was aware, distantly of the gathering of many large bodies, of their heavy shadows on his small, cowering person—of feet crunching the grass by his head and of conversation exchanged. Finally a hand reached down and snagged the rope trailing from his wrists, pulling it and him up to his knees and holding him suspended there, with his arms over his head, his face bowed, aware—oh, so very painfully aware of the gathered eyes that skimmed his body. A hand reached down and grasped his jaw, tipping his head back.

  Through the damp tangle of his hair, Yhalen focused on a face that didn’t tower quite so far over his own as the other ogres. A face that didn’t have the broad, blockish bone structure of the others. A face that might have looked human, save for the sharp, protruding points of the canines and the gold eyes and the long pointed ears crowded with dangling gold rings and the greenish ochre cast to his skin. A frightening face all the same, with eyes that were cold and intelligent and assessing.

  He was very large, the creature that held Yhalen’s hands above his head, a good two heads taller than Yhalen himself, and rippling with dense muscle—but his body, under the beaten metal armor and the creaking black leather that adorned it, wasn’t blocky, or stout like his larger brethren. Rather, it hinted at agile, supple strength and—one dared to hope—more human proportions. Granted, no human Yhalen had ever seen was so large, but it wasn’t out of the range of possibility that a man might be born of such stature. But compared to the other ogres, this one with his dangling trinkets and fine armor and long broadsword hanging from his belt was a dwarf. He stood an arm’s length shorter than the smallest of his brethren and was probably half their weight, and yet still they seemed to afford him great respect. Even the largest of them wouldn’t quite meet the eyes of this smaller creature.

  Yhalen’s former earringed captor did, though. There was something akin to malicious humor in his eyes when he spoke, inclining his head in an almost mocking manner as he indicated Yhalen himself. It seemed as if he were being presented as a token or a gift from one to the other. Why or for what purpose, Yhalen had no clue, but the smaller ogre spoke a few words to one of the large ones at his back, and that one swept Yhalen up under its arm and carted him out of the cluster of ogres, under the heavy flaps of the tent behind them and into shadowed darkness.

  He was dumped unceremoniously onto a low pallet covered with furs. It had been made to accommodate someone of an ogre’s stature and Yhalen was dwarfed upon it. He didn’t protest when the ogre dragged his hands over his head and fastened the rope to the wooden frame of the pallet. He left him soon after, retreating back outside the tent to join in the loud discussion between its fellows.

  Yhalen curled on his side and lay there, listening to the sound of his own hammering heart and the rumbling voices of the ogres outside that gradually retreated, leaving only the background noises of a large encampment. It was the most comfort and peace that he’d had for two days. A body could almost find itself lulled to sleep on soft, clean furs, if the prospect of what horror the future would bring didn’t keep him coiled and tense and frightened.

  Father would be so ashamed, he thought, pressing his face into the crook of his arm. Father who was the proud, fearless protector of the Ydregi—who expected nothing less from his only offspring. If Father only knew how badly Yhalen had disgraced himself, how irrevocably his honor had been shredded, both by his own deeds and the actions of others. He didn’t know if he could face him again—didn’t know if he could stand beneath the censure of his father’s eyes and not shrivel in upon himself. He couldn’t even fathom meeting the eyes of Yherji’s father and Yhakinor’s bondmate.

  It must have been hours that he lay, immersed in his misery—for when the heavy flaps of the tent next shifted, there was the purple light of evening outside. Yhalen tensed, almost not wanting to see what entered, but to his vast relief it was only a human man. One of the collared, bearded slaves, with skin and hair so pale that Yhalen had never seen the like. The mostly naked man lugged a large pail of water, which he poured into a bronze basin.

  “Help me….”

  Was that Yhalen’s voice, so hoarse and shaky that it was almost unrecognizable as his own?

  Pale blue eyes flicked his way. The broad, lined face held no emotion, no empathy for Yhalen’s plight.

  “Please,” he whispered, as disheartened by that blank stare as by anything else he’d seen in this camp.

  The slave made no motion that he’d even heard. Maybe he didn’t understand Yhalen’s words at all.

  He left, taking his empty bucket with him and soon after the tent flap shifted again, this time under the hand of a much larger creature. The ogre who was not quite an ogre entered, gold eyes passing fleetingly over Yhalen’s curled form before ignoring him in favor of shedding the armor that encased his body.

  Yhalen stared—couldn’t help but stare in horror—at the creature into whose possession he’d been given. Piece by careful piece, the armor was shed and placed on a crude wooden rack. Thick, rippling muscles, encased in smooth, pale skin that shifted in the light between olive and ocher, were revealed.

  A fine coating of black hair matted a broad chest, trailing down a stomach corded with muscle, to disappear under the band of leather trousers. Black hair shifted about those broad shoulders, sweat damped, but for all appearances soft and sleek. The ogre went to the bronze basin and washed its face, soaking a rag and wetting the back of his neck under the thick mane of hair. It was a methodical ritual, almost, the care in which he cleansed his body. Quite surprising, considering the stench of the four that Yhalen had traveled as a prisoner of.

  Finally, the ogre turned, damp with drying water, all seven foot plus of him bristling with barely suppressed masculine energy, piercing gold eyes very much now interested in what lay upon his bed.

  He padded forward, his movements rolling and predatory and bent to press a knee to the pallet.

  Yhalen flinched, nails biting into his palms with dread. He curled his knees close to his body, in a vain effort to protect himself—to cover himself—and the ogre’s mouth twitched in what might have been a smile of amusement, before it reached down and grasped his knees, turning him easily onto his back, forcing his legs down so that it could access his shrinking body.

  “Please, please, please…don’t….”

  He hardly realiz
ed he was whispering. Hardly heard himself over the blood pounding in his ears.

  His supplication had certainly made no difference to the others when they’d been torturing him. The sound of his voice had only seemed to make them want to hurt him more.

  They had no more effect on this one. He ran a hand—granted, a much smaller hand than the others, but still large enough to easily cover Yhalen’s face with his palm—up Yhalen’s stomach, to graze one nipple with a thumb. Then up to his face, brushing back the wild tangle of Yhalen’s hair to bare the curve of his cheek, the hollow of his eye, the smooth angle of his forehead. A finger pressed against his lips, pressing the softness against his clenched teeth, as if it wanted entrance. Terror or no terror, Yhalen wasn’t yet prepared to declare such submission.

  But that seemed to amuse this one as well, and he let his big hand drift back down the body below his, again pushing down the knee that rose involuntarily to protect the flesh between Yhalen’s legs. He was palmed and shifted, the ogre lifting his balls and prodding at the clenched entrance behind them.

  Yhalen did shut his eyes then, mortified, pulling uselessly at the rope binding his hands to the pallet frame.

  “Don’t—touch me—don’t—murdering monster!” he hissed, twisting enough to get the leverage to kick out. The ogre fended off the blow with one arm, his amused smile fading to something more deadly that showed the sharp points of his fangs. He rose suddenly, towering over Yhalen on the low lying pallet, loosening the laces of his trousers and stepping out of them, revealing legs every bit as long and well-muscled as his arms and between them—well, certainly nothing as terrifying as what his full-sized brethren possessed, but—an organ that would intimidate even the proudest human male. It probably wouldn’t kill him, if the ogre planned to use it as he feared—but it would hurt a great deal.